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A Biography by John Lahr<\/strong><\/p>\n 765 pp. New York: Norton and Company<\/strong><\/p>\n Reviewed by Patricia Keeney<\/strong> [1]<\/sup><\/a> (Canada)<\/p>\n Perhaps best-known internationally as senior theatre critic for The New <\/em>Yorker for some two decades, John Lahr is the author of 18 books and is a double winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. He is one of the best at his art. Tennessee Williams, on the other hand, is arguably America\u2019s greatest playwright. To have Lahr writing on Williams is a match made in heaven and a magnificent example of the role a critic can play in articulating and interpreting the creative life of a major artistic figure.<\/p>\n Lahr\u2019s story begins in New York. It is 1945. It is opening night of The Glass Menagerie<\/em> at the Playhouse Theatre \u201con the unfashionable side of Broadway.\u201d In the audience sits Williams\u2019s \u201cchic, diminutive agent Audrey Wood,\u201d the agent who believes fiercely, instinctively in his work, the agent who represents the likes of William Inge, Carson McCullers, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman; the agent whom Williams will unceremoniously dump thirty years later in a fit of drug-induced panic over the staging of a late play.<\/p>\n The life roars and ranges where it must, defying limits. The art follows for better and worse, but always true and answerable, to the internal drama within Williams himself. He was the most autobiographical of playwrights, and, as he confessed to drama critic Brooks Atkinson, the thing that drove his writing was a desperation. His plays make \u201ca spectacle of his haunted interior,\u201d one inhabited by his family. Or as Williams\u2019 friend, novelist Gore Vidal, observed, this formed the playwright\u2019s \u201cbasic repertory company.\u201d<\/p>\n Williams claimed that fame ultimately brought him \u201cspiritual dislocation.\u201d Its presence was profound, both positively and negatively. Enjoying his celebrity status in New Orleans society, he met his first real love, \u201cthe muscular, volatile Pancho Rodriguez y Gonzales. The \u201ccombustible\u201d Pancho was the embodiment of Williams\u2019s desire for \u201csome wild thing.\u201d However, as Lahr puts it, Williams had to unlearn repression: this meant doing battle with the congenital shyness that prevented him from showing or knowing his feelings.\u201d Discovering that sex was \u201ca way of discharging aggression,\u201d he went, in a little over a year, \u201cfrom prude to lewd,\u201d admitting to Playboy<\/em>, \u201cI\u2019m just terribly over-sexed.\u201d Along with work, pleasures of the flesh became paramount. \u201cI\u2019d like to have a simple life\u2014with epic fornications,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n From Provincetown, Williams informed his friends that he enjoyed a life of conga lessons, writing, \u201cswimming every day, drinking every day and fucking every night.\u201d Here he also met Kip Kiernan, a dancer and student of sculpture whom he christened \u201cthe young Njinsky.\u201d In a description of his \u201cravished surrender\u201d to this Adonis, Williams waxes erotically lyrical: \u201cHis skin is steaming hot like the hide of a horse that\u2019s been galloping.\u201d Ultimately, Kip left, married and died prematurely at 26 but, as Lahr observes, \u201cthrough the alchemy of Williams\u2019s stagecraft, in a sense, he also never went away.\u201d<\/p>\n For Vidal, \u201cTennessee could not possess his own life until he had written about it.\u201d He would begin with unfulfilled desire, turn the resulting reveries into story, then ultimately into drama. This transition can be seen in Summer and Smoke<\/em> and A Streetcar Named Desire<\/em>, plays that pick up the story of Williams\u2019s psychic evolution where Glass Menagerie <\/em>left off.<\/p>\n It should perhaps be noted here that the book is also rich in photos, each one revealing. We see Pancho\u2019s cocky, mischievous smirk as he and Williams sniff trellised flowers in the first flush of their romance; Brando towering nonchalantly over quivering porcelain doll Jessica Tandy in Streetcar<\/em>, a wisp of her dress held casually in his hand, his face a casual, quizzical study of untold violence; a 1948 snapshot of drinking and writing buddies Gore Vidal (pretty as a homecoming queen), Truman Capote (grinning like a kid who\u2019s just caught a foul ball at a baseball game) and Williams (in his element, beaming).<\/p>\n Unerringly, Lahr structures his wealth of information like a well-made play, each chapter highlighting the pivotal events of a life, each event a catalyst for new work. The Rose Tatoo, <\/em>as one example, emerges from Williams\u2019 next tempestuous and long lasting relationship, Frank Merlo. At a creative impasse, after the success of Menagerie<\/em> and Streetcar<\/em> and the \u201cBroadway disappointment of Summer and Smoke<\/em>,\u201d wanting \u201ca new song to sing and the power to sing it,\u201d Williams recognized that since his subject was himself, he could not make a change in his art without the transformation of his inner life. His relationship with Merlo accomplished this. Of Italian origin, gregarious and quick witted, Merlo was just what Williams needed and together they roamed Europe.<\/p>\n Eventually, Williams and Merlot moved to \u201cthe Bohemian outpost of Key West, \u2018where, joined by his spirited grandfather Dakin, they bought a house which would become Williams\u2019s only permanent home and where now, he began happily to complete the script which morphed into The Rose Tatoo<\/em>.\u2019\u201d In Lahr\u2019s characterization, \u201cMerlo\u2019s tales of his Sicilian community\u2014with its aggressions and repressions, its emotional extravagance\u2014excited Williams\u2019 imagination and suited his rhythm.\u201d It also \u201cstrategically allowed Williams to depart from the familiar topography of the [American] South, as from the tropes of Southern character, caste, and speech that threatened to stereotype his work.\u201d<\/p>\n Immediately recognizing the new play needed major restructuring in order to release the power of its poetry, director Elia Kazan was brought in to perform his magic, putting Williams to work for half a year on the re-visioning. The play was such a major departure from Williams\u2019s earlier style that is was said it should not be played but rather painted. As Lahr points out, \u201cthe expressive burden was borne \u2026 by the visual instead of the lines.\u201d<\/p>\n Finally, Anna Magnani, who for Williams, embodied \u201cthe warmth and vigour of a panther,\u201d was (due to her many diva-style demands) unsuccessfully wooed, to play the leading part. With a young Eli Wallach playing the Dionysian Mangiacavello and Kazan\u2019s streamlined final draft that focused on the thawing \u201cof a widow\u2019s frozen heart,\u201d The Rose Tatoo<\/em> offered storytelling that, as Lahr says, \u201csparkled with a new impressionism, a theatrical shorthand in which Williams\u2019s familiar lyricism was not purely verbal but lay in his orchestration of the visual with the verbal.\u201d<\/p>\n The 1950s for Williams were turbulent, both personally and politically. America ushered in McCarthyism, reinforcing homophobia and bringing under fire \u201cthe psychic romance of Williams\u2019 plays.\u201d In a battle for the dominant \u201ccultural narrative,\u201d epitomized by controversy over the film version of Streetcar<\/em>, Hollywood, now reflecting society as a squeaky clean \u201csuperbia,\u201d wanted the pivotal rape scene excised from the play. Fleeing again to Italy with Merlo (who was kicking against the \u201cgolden cage\u201d of his life with the famous author), Williams began work on what would become Cat on a Hot Tin Roof<\/em>. The drinker Brick, \u201cwho takes up residence in the bottom of a glass,\u201d says Lahr, \u201crepresents Williams\u2019s desire for retreat.\u201d By 1952, the House Committee on Un-American activities went after Kazan for his former affiliation with the Communist Party. Kazan saw no reason not to name names and, as a result, he became a pariah in some quarters of the arts community, though not to Williams.<\/p>\n Williams was now working on Camino Real<\/em>, a \u201cphantasmagoria of [his] inner life as well as a statement about the \u2026 suppression of any dissident voices in American society.\u201d Kazan identified with the play\u2019s theme of fighting back, finding a life beyond life, for \u201can ecstasy\u201d beyond the flesh. For Lahr this \u201cspiritual grasping \u2026 appears \u2026 in the topography of the set as a Terra Incognita, a desert that lies between the walled town and the snow-capped mountains in the distance.\u201d<\/p>\n The writing, Williams told Kazan, has a \u201cwild, breathless, stammering quality which reflects my own brink of hysteria.\u201d Kilroy, \u201ca king who has lost his crown\u201d seems to represent Williams\u2019s own conflict between \u201cbeing great and being good.\u201d He was also the first character in Broadway theatre history \u201cto shuttle between the aisles and the stage.\u201d What Kazan envisioned as a ritualistic dance approximating the \u201cbizarre fantasy of \u2026 Mexican primitive art\u201d was in the end sabotaged by a realistic set that Kazan later admitted should never have been allowed. The New York critics were merciless, while prominent artists and writers (John Steinbeck, Edith Sitwell, William Inge and Clifford Odets) hailed the work.<\/p>\n At 42, Williams returned to the pine-filled creative mornings of Key West. When he got there he took up Cat on a Hot Tin Roof<\/em>. It is here that Lahr\u2019s theme of the self-consuming artist takes over. \u201cBrick,\u201d he says is a \u201cmonument to absence,\u201d enacting onstage the same tactics that Williams did in life, compelling other people to help him but never actually changing, whereas Maggie, by contrast, is \u201call combat\u201d and \u201cmanic vitality.\u201d Big Daddy, in his bluster and bravado, was based on Williams\u2019s own father who would say to his mother: \u201cYou\u2019re making me as nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof.\u201d The play, claimed Williams, is about vitality, therefore survival, therefore the war raging within him.<\/p>\n Following his rapidly deteriorating connection with Merlo, chemicals and alcohol become a mainstay. His work of the mid-50s, says Lahr, \u201cregistered an ancient despair about the possibility of love.\u201d His major play of this period, Orpheus Descending<\/em>, contains the central image of a bird that sleeps on the wind, never touching earth except to die. It mirrors the playwright\u2019s sense of a threatened imagination. With Anna Magnani playing the Lady (a woman whose emotional past keeps her on the verge of hysteria), Williams had the authenticity he needed but also constant complaints about \u201cher English, her schedule, her money, her weight and her co-star,\u201d Marlon Brando (16 years her junior) whom she wanted to eat for breakfast.<\/p>\n \u201cWilliams,\u201d as Lahr puts it \u201cwas finally ready for the psychiatrist\u2019s couch.\u201d Laurence S. Kubie, a pioneering Freudian psychologist was recommended and his suggestion was to deprive the playwright of \u201call his addictions: drink, men, travel and writing.\u201d Williams responded by fleeing to Havana where \u201cthe swimming and fucking [were] wonderful.\u201d His gay and artistic friends responded that psychiatry was trying to turn the radical Williams into \u201ca good team player.\u201d What Williams did gain was a re-assessment of his father and mother. The new material gave rise to Suddenly Last Summer<\/em>, a play allowing him to come to terms with his mother\u2019s \u201cpunishing passive-aggression.\u201d<\/p>\n Unable to live with or without Merlo, in Europe once again after concluding analysis, Williams now began to see that he had artistic success but no life. \u201cHis work,\u201d says Lahr, \u201cwas a way of living was also a way of dying.\u201d Out of this sad realization came Sweet Bird of Youth<\/em> in which the fading star, Princess Kosmonopolis and Chance Wayne, her hapless gigolo, \u201ca would-be star \u2026 returns to his home town in a doomed attempt to recover the love of his youth.\u201d These two, strung out along exhausted lines of life and fame, are Williams in his spiritual dilemma. In Lahr\u2019s words, \u201cby cultivating his literary persona, he had starved his private one.\u201d<\/p>\n By the 1960s, the winds of change were blowing and Williams was very aware that he might be superseded by the straight-talking, spare styles of such \u201csavagely truthful\u201d absurdist playwrights as Albee, Pinter and Beckett. \u201cIf Williams couldn\u2019t die,\u201d says Lahr, \u201che could imagine his death\u201d and does so in The Milk Train Doesn\u2019t Stop Here Any More<\/em>. \u201cA poem of death\u201d about \u201cthe last two days of an imperious wealthy woman\u2019s existence on her mountaintop estate where she has gone to finish writing her memoirs,\u201d this play sounded \u201cthe unmistakable note of Beckett\u2019s ennui.\u201d With that \u201cpill-popping Georgia swamp-bitch,\u201d Mrs. Goforth (a name encoding the playwright\u2019s insistence on continuing) and the mysterious boy poet and mobile-maker Chris, an emissary of the intuitive realm that Williams felt he was losing, Lahr describes Milk Train <\/em>as a \u201cmurky play\u201d that accurately describes the creative and emotional knife-edge on which Williams was then perched.<\/p>\n Even the most underrated of the 1960s plays, The Gnadges Fraulein<\/em>, \u201ca surrealistic romp,\u201d called forth a combination of scorn and recognition. \u201cA brilliant talent is sleeping,\u201d declared Stanley Kauffman in the Times<\/em>, while Harold Clurman acknowledged the play\u2019s \u201codd but effective mixture of gallows humour and Rabelaisian zest.\u201d The playwright\u2019s friends worried mightily about him as he took up \u201cdesperate residence in his imagination,\u201d writing The Two-Character Play<\/em> in which, observes Lahr, \u201cthe broken world of the theatre and the disorder of Williams\u2019s own hermetic mind\u201d are suggested by the play\u2019s backstage clutter indicating \u201can incomplete interior.\u201d<\/p>\n Between 1965 and 1970, he lived what has come to be called his Stoned Age, \u201cthat twilight zone in which he \u2018elected to be a zombie (fueled by drugs and alcohol) except for my mornings at work.\u2019\u201d In an unhealthy relationship with the bisexual Bill Glavin, \u201ca charming New Jersey-born lost soul.\u201d A poem from that time begins: \u201cOld men go mad at night\/ but are not Lears.\u201d It ends: \u201cAnd old men have no Fools except themselves.\u201d Photos of him show a stiff mask of a man in existential paralysis. Committed by his brother to a psychiatric ward for a time, tests revealed that he was suffering from acute drug poisoning.<\/p>\n Yet he continued to write. Small Craft Warnings,<\/em> as Harold Clurman reviewed it, \u201cportrayed homosexuality for the first time rather than just implying it\u201d and this, despite the natural reticence of a writer \u201ctoo oblique and allusive for polemical drama.\u201d Yet, the catastrophic social unrest of 1968 and the anti-Vietnam riots told Williams clearly that the future was no longer in his hands.<\/p>\n At 60 he was also being infected by the youthful passion he saw all around him. A friend actually introduced Williams to such key players in the movement as Kate Millett, Betty Friedan, Robert Mapplethorpe, Charles Ludlum, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, easily reinforcing the playwright\u2019s instinctive opposition to authority. Though he was not by nature a public demonstrator or protester, the power of the counterculture to resist \u201cpsychic numbing\u201d (both his own and that inflicted by the political world) worked its way into plays like Small Craft Warnings\u2014<\/em>a metaphoric cry for emotional, vulnerability and risk. While critically acclaimed, Warnings<\/em> seemed to the homosexual community a betrayal of sorts. In response, Williams declared that homosexuality was never his theme but rather human relationships.<\/p>\n Williams now took up with an acerbic, \u201chandsome, pony-tailed, 25-year old\u201d Robert Carroll, a novelist. Recognizing himself in Carroll\u2019s mercurial character, this prickly pairing created a late life personal drama. From Bangkok to Positano to Key West, they loved and fought until parting became inevitable. Nevertheless, Williams continued to give Carroll editorial help and remembered him generously in his will.<\/p>\n In Lahr\u2019s estimation, Williams continued at this point in his life to write simply to survive. For Lahr, the \u201cthin late\u201d plays combine \u201c\u2018elegance and anxiety,\u2019 in their dramatization of the retreat of his attenuated self\u201d and the final full-length play, A House Not Meant to Stand<\/em> turned suffering around. Savage and sensational, this \u201cfunhouse of mirrors\u201d laughed at the pain of a humiliating past, reflecting it back as pleasure. Playing at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago to positive notices, House<\/em> was lauded as \u201cthe best thing Williams has written since Small Craft Warnings<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n At the age of 70 (1981) ,Williams found himself the recipient both of the Commonwealth Award for Distinguished Service in Drama (which he shared with Harold Pinter) and an honorary degree from Harvard. Two years later, however, he was found dead in his hotel room, bottles of the drug seconal and red wine (a dangerous combination) on his night table.<\/p>\n Of all the public acclaim at his death, perhaps the simplicity of Kazan stood out: \u201cWilliams lived a very good life, full of the most profound pleasures and he lived it precisely as he chose.\u201d Lahr finally reports here that Williams\u2019 reputation suffered in the years after his death in great measure because self-appointed literary executor, Maria St. Just, with no academic training and \u201cno understanding of how a literary reputation is made \u2026 managed to freeze almost all critical discourse\u201d about his work for 13 years. Once freed of St. Just, productions of Williams\u2019 works soared again both at home and abroad.<\/p>\n Lahr\u2019s own summation?<\/p>\n \u201cIn his struggle to unlearn repression, to claim his freedom, and to forge glory out of grief, Williams turned his own delirium into one of the twentieth century\u2019s great chronicles of the brilliance and the barbarity of individualism\u2026. Out of the sad little wish to be loved, Williams made characters so large that they became part of American folklore \u2026 Blanche, Stanley, Big Daddy, Brick, Amanda and Laura \u2026 sensational ghosts who haunt us through the ages with their fierce, flawed lives. Williams allowed words to live like anthems in the national imagination: \u2018I have always depended on the kindness of strangers;\u2019 \u2018Sometimes\u2014there\u2019s God\u2014so quickly.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Williams\u2019 was a turbulent life and his towering art is profoundly articulated here by a wide-ranging, arrow-accurate critical mind. Lahr\u2019s book locks two passionate lovers of language and theatre into a single volume, one that bristles throughout with scintillating, profound, painful, comic, but always revealing insights on love, art and twentieth century American society as viewed through the lens of theatre.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a rare and thrilling read. Absolutely first-rate biography.<\/a><\/p>\n
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